Winning Hangman Words

rimrocker · Sep 16, 2016

syzygy

You go through all the vowels to get to Y and unless you know the word, you'll use a lot more letters before finding Z.

queue

The E's come quickly, but then you burn through a bunch of hard consonants before lucking into Q or circling back to the vowels, of which U will likely be the last.

Buck Turgidson · Sep 16, 2016

http://nowiknow.com/hangmans-most-difficult-word/

Hangman — a short, easy to play game: all one needs is a pencil, piece of paper, and a friend. A staple of bored school children everywhere, the game has origins dating back to the late 1900s.

But what’s the hardest word to guess?

Jon McLoone built a computer game — with a series of algorithms — to figure out that exact question. It rests on a key assumption: the guesser will pick common letters (e.g. vowels) measurably and proportionally more often than exceptionally rare ones (Q, X, Z, J). McLoone then simulated fifty Hangman runs for every single word in the dictionary. That’s 90,000 words, totaling nearly 5 million games on Hangman.

Some words were easily guessed, typically requiring fewer than five incorrect letters offered. For example, the word “difficult” proved easy — in its 50 trials, the simulator guessed, on average, only 3.3 incorrect letters. Allowing for eight incorrect ones before our stick figure meets an untimely death, the word “difficult” only caused one stick-death. Allowing for ten? Mr. Stick had a 100% survival rate.

Having gathered all this data on 90,000 words, McLoone selected the 1,000 most promising, and then ran the game 3,000 times using just those thousand. All said and done, McLoone “played” nearly 8 million games of Hangman in order to determine that the hardest Hangman word to guess — regardless of whether the guesser has 8, 9, 10, or even up to 13 guesses, is “jazz.”
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BamBam · Sep 16, 2016

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The Hunted · Sep 16, 2016

In Hanging with Friends I like to go with four letter words with two different vowels in them. The opponent usually runs out of guesses trying to figure out if the word is "done" or "bone."

bobrek · Sep 16, 2016

The Hunted said: ↑

In Hanging with Friends I like to go with four letter words with two different vowels in them. The opponent usually runs out of guesses trying to figure out if the word is "done" or "bone."
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Or cone, lone, hone, gone, zone.

GIGO · Sep 16, 2016

Buck Turgidson said: ↑

http://nowiknow.com/hangmans-most-difficult-word/

Hangman — a short, easy to play game: all one needs is a pencil, piece of paper, and a friend. A staple of bored school children everywhere, the game has origins dating back to the late 1900s.
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Isn't it the late 19th century?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangman_(game)#History
"The origins of Hangman are obscure meaning not discovered, but it seems to have arisen in Victorian times," says Tony Augarde, author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games. The game is mentioned in Alice Bertha Gomme's "Traditional Games" in 1894 under the name "Birds, Beasts and Fishes."
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BTW, what does "the late 1900s" mean? Is it like 1907-1909? Or does it mean like 1990-1999? (Sorry to digress from the topic.)

Buck Turgidson · Sep 16, 2016

GIGO said: ↑

(Sorry to digress from the topic.)
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Good catch.

20th Century Fox really needs to get with the times.

Creepy Crawl · Sep 18, 2016

GIGO said: ↑

Isn't it the late 19th century?

BTW, what does "the late 1900s" mean? Is it like 1907-1909? Or does it mean like 1990-1999? (Sorry to digress from the topic.)
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I caught that too. I remember in my senior year in 94, Hangman was all the rage.

Hustle Town · Sep 18, 2016

http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/08/13/25-best-hangman-words/

Best words overall

More fun: Best "long" words

Jontro · Sep 18, 2016

Jontro is opposed to violent games.

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Winning Hangman Words

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